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Show ;: - ; , Spank the Baby and ' "1 Reform the World i ' I ("By Elizabeth M. Gilmer.) i i It is one of life's ironies that the' Tvrmen who most conscientiously try I to be the best mothers are usually the . I -worst, and that maternal devotion can I vork more harm to its object In a minute min-ute than maternal malevolence could . arhieve in a week. ) ji reople who are believers in the luck . J I theory in. life nowhere elee find their faith so fully justified as in the .way children turn out. 'it is the watched child of the mother, so careful that she i v ill not even trust a nurse, that always f:,lls and break its arms, while nothing ; txer happens to the children of the ; -ar-Iess mother who lets her offspring nmke a playground of the trolley track, ami a toboggan slide of the apartment house fire escape. It is -the children J who are given every advantage of j ; education and culture whose club- voiiian mother reads and studies with ; ihcm and devotes herself to their en- lightenment who grow up into com-' com-' n 1011 place, unbookish men and worsen, v ith a Philistine taste in art and liter-i liter-i rturr: while the children of a Marie j 'oivlli-aiid-Laura - Jean-Libbey-read-l ing mother develop a passion for let- tors and graduate into learned profes- sons and distinguished scientists. Every prison in the land is filled with children j of good, pious, praying mothers who I sp' iu their lives trying to do their duty j i:i the holy estate of parenthood to ) which they had been called, f To the average observer it is a clear case of kismet. You raise your child right or wrong, wisely or unwisely, and it turns out as a fate ordains. It is a cheering alid consoling faith; but uh-J uh-J fortunately it is a false" doctrine. No- where else in the world does the law j i pf caui-e and effect work out so inexor- i i :ibly as in the rearing of children, and ! 1 there is no drunkard, no gambler, noi murderer, no thief, no unsuccessful man I or woman who has not a right to turn j I and accuse the mother who bore him I or her of being accessory to the crime ' I for which punisment has been meted ; j out. Sentimentalists have embalmed a ! I another's tears in song and story, but! I the tears a mother sheds over a way- j I ward son or daughter are drops of ', t shame because there would be no need i " ,1 fur them but for her own fault. j 7 The responsibility of motherhood falls I heavily upon a woman in America as I it does nowhere else, for, except for I the purpose of legitimacy and support, I the American child is fatherless. The s average American man considers that j he has done his full duty by his chil- 1 dren when he furnishes the money for I their food and clothes. Not one father in a thousand takes the slightest control over his offspring, or even gets acquainted ac-quainted with them. If they are bad. , he demands to know of their mother v hy she doesn't make them behave, and If she fails, he grumbles at her lack of management; but he does not try to i find out the peculiarities of the little j J mind and soul with which his wife has . I lacked the .wisdom and the intuition j I and courage to cope. I I Lack of Perceptive Fathers. I The lack of fathers is the greatest 1 lack of this country today, for there are - I few women who have the broad intel- I ligence, the knowledge of the world, f the backbone and the grit to manage a I family properly. Sooner or later there I comes in the life of every child a time when it rebels at petticoat government, I when it has a contempt for mother's home-made opinions and judgment and I for the authority she is too weak to (enforce. Then it is that a man's strong .-rasp is needed on the reins of family government. The children re.pect his point of view because it is that of the outside world; they defer to his author- ity because he has physical power to J' I enforce it. Insurrections in the home, I I like insurrections .-in the nations, are f the unmistablable evidence of a feeble f I and inefficient ruler, j It is, however, condition and not a I theory with which women are called I upon to deal in raising children, and j fince they do not receive assistance to I which they are entitled from their hus- f bands, it behooves them to give all the fr.-.ore study and thought to doing worthily the most Important duty a - woman can be called up to perform. I That women fnil so often at this for f j the successful mother is as rare as tha I I successful musician or painter or poet f is r,ne one of the most pitiful things in ; ! the world, made all the more piteous by I I the fact that women give the best years I ! of their life to it; they give their health and strength, days of anxiety and j A sleepless nights; they give their hopes, ? their prayers, their very souls to it, ; , and in the end so often reap only a harvest of tears for all their efforts. I 1 Why is it that women, good women. intelligent women, fail so often as mothers in raiding their children? Is I it fate or the woman's fault? I answer j that it is the woman's fault every time I cvpii, nay most, in those dread cases I of hereditary tendencies toward evil i against which the wisdom of the ser- I Pit and the goodness of ang?ls work I in vain. The womin who marries when ! I her own blood flows a vicious tide, or I f who gives her children a drunken cr an V immoral father, ;s solely responsible for the decadent beings, predestined to sin, 1 that she brings into the world. - Barring' hereditary degeneracy and j I wo lay a bit of blai.:e on our forefathers I j which we ought to shoulder ourselves , the chief reason that women fail as 1 I mothers is through love. Like the he- f I loinp of the old poem, they "love not I wisely, but too well." "With the aver- I age woman maternal affection is a pas- I I sion that blinds hrr perceptions, stulti- f lies hc-r judgment and renders her ! J m. rail v and physically incapable of f I taking a rational attitude toward her t f mMi child. In other respects she may I li kind, just, considerate, forbearing, t I Vut where her child is concerned she is ; I :i monster of ruthless cruelty and self- i j k-hness to thers. if H of us have seen a mother permit ' I her child to disturb a whole roomful of poople by howls of temper that sh ; I did not even attempt to squelch. W e ! have seen her let a selfish brat make a feeble old grandmother or grandfath- ! cr give up some particular chair that i the little demon wanted to play horse with AVe have seen mothers clamly f acouiesce while their little vandals ! I scratched pictures with a pin on our I lx,t mahogany, or smeared bread and cutter over our collection of first-proof 1 I el, hings, and commit a. thousand other ; rimes against the peace and happiness of all about them, yet the mother never interfered. If another woman s child had done it she would have called for the police, if necessary to suppress the ( infant terror, but .she can't see foi ' the , life of her why anybody should object,; I jut . ,.. ,,,., t,rv howl or her 1 to ncaring ei mil'- , , -t little Johnny nash the bric-a-brac I Kvery woman's own perambulator is 'I Ihe car of Juggernaut under ,V ; crushes her acquaintances without a I pang of compunction. j I . Keaid Them as an Affliction.. 1 ' To such an extent has this been car- I I ri-dthat instead of children being 1 looked upon as an attraction, everbody 1 outside of their immediate family re- j ! gards them as an affliction. Apartment, (houses and hotels . bar . their doom against them, servants refuse to work in households possessing them.- and when you hear that even your dearest friend is coming to visit you and bring the children you have the same kind of I V feeling of despair . that you would if Y Fhe were going to bring the leprosy or , the Asiatic cholera. This Ms not the ! J child's fault It is the fault of the ' " 11 - w mother who ' from the' child's earliest consciousness has spent her time burning burn-ing incense before it, cultivating tyranny tyran-ny In it,, fostering its egotism, teaching it by word and deed that nobody has any rights which it is bound to respect. There is nothing1 on earth so lovable, so adorable as a sweet, unspoiled child, and that the mothers of the country are united in trying to extinguish this nce familiar type of being is a crime against high heaven. The p3cond reason why women- fail as mothers grows out of overlove. and is overtenderness. The mother cannot bear to think that her children must do any of the hard things of life, or bear any of the heavy burdens, and in this you have the secret of the great majority ma-jority of failures. Perhaps there is not a man or woman living today who cannot look back to some definite episode epi-sode of childhood and in the mother's attitude on that occasion trace the success suc-cess or disaster of a whole career. It may "have been the most trifling thing imaginable a hard lesson that they wanted to shirk, a task begun that proved distasteful that they wanted to give up, a morning when they wanted to turn over on their pillow and sleep again instead of starting out to work with the whistle but however trifling it was, it was the turning point of fate. If the mother shamed the child into learning the hard lesion, if she forced it to keep on with the task until it was done, if she held the boy or girl to the work, the habit of overcoming difficulties difficul-ties was formed, persistence was bred in the very bones, reliability became a part of being, and the girl or boy inevitably in-evitably gravitated toward success. On the other hand, the child whose mother is so tender that she tries to fhield it from eyeryj hardship is foredoomed fore-doomed to fai'ures, because she has taught it insensibly to gye up before every difficulty. Strength of character is just as much, the result of exercising one's mental and moral muscles as strength of body is developing one's physical sinews. You do not train a prie fighter by having him loll about on silken cushions, and it is just as impossible im-possible to fit a child for the battle of !ife by having it spend its youth on flowery beds of mother-love and a tenderness ten-derness that protects it from every hard knock of life. There is such a little while, at best, that a mother can take care of her child. The time comes so soon when every one of us must go out into the world and stand or fall by ourselves, that it does seem as if-women might use some sense in dealing with the subject. sub-ject. For the ones who succeed are not the ones on whom the winds have not been permitted to blow roughly. It is the ones that have learned to take their punishment, to be knocked down and get up and fight again, not the ones who throw up. their hands at the first blow. Cowardly and "L&zj. . ' A third reason who women fall as mothers is because they are cowardly and lazy. It is much easier to give up ' yourself than it is to make a child give up, that the majority of wonren follow I the path of least resistance and meek- . ly submit to the caprices of their off- j ppring. The seat of government in the American home is the nursery, and the new commandment reads, "Parents obey your children, then your days may be peaceful." Now nobody will contend that managing a strong-willed, bigh-tempered bigh-tempered child, full of animal spirits and determined on its own pleasure, is an easy task. On the contrary. It is about the most strenuous job that any human being can undertake, but upon its being accomplished rests the welfare wel-fare here and hereafter of an immortal immor-tal soul. Every woman knows that. She also knows, that obedience-is the beginning of all law and order and religion and morality, yet the spectacle of a child who -ould obey, who would do what It is told to do without argument or comment or tears and howls, would be a spectacle so rare that people would travel miles to see it, and pay out good money for the pleasure of beholding a creature that has become as mythical as the fabled dodo. All about us we see children still in pinafores and knickerbockers whose mothers lament that they are already beyond their control, con-trol, and yet with a spanking machine on the market, and rattan canes in the corner store, these women are making no effort to establish a permanent form of-government over them, simply and solely because they lack the backbone to stand up and fight it out once for all with the little usurpers. The final reason why women fail as mothers is because they are so blinded by their own partiality that they see their children through a glorified halo instead of as they are, and this robs them of the opportunity they would otherwise have to correct their children's chil-dren's faults and supply their deficiencies. deficien-cies. It is a beautiful phase of mother-love that every crow believes her nestling to be a swan, but It's pretty rough on the crow, and it is one of the most pathetic and cruel things in the world that this besotted mother-infatuation mother-infatuation prevents millions of afflicted afflict-ed people from having the help 'that modern science and modern education can sive. Every woman believes that her own j children are infant prodigies of beauty and intelligence and virtue. Unless they are hideously deformed "she does not even perceive thtir physical blemishes, and so they are allowed to grow up knock-kneed or bandy-legged, with squinting eyes or a jimber-jaw, when a little judicious treatment for a surgeon sur-geon in childhood would have remedied the defect and made them presentable for life. Mentally the mother displays the same obtuseness. The first article in her code is that her child is as smart as anybody else's child and so s-he has the dull witted boy or girl dragged through the same course of study as her neighbor's clever child, and the result re-sult is that many a child that, had its mother recognized its limitations and had it educated according to them, would have done reasonably well, is forced into absolute idiocy. Morally the same thing may be said. Not one mother in a million will face the truth that her child has a tendency to lie or steal or drink, and so the poor helpless little creature, with no hand to help it fight its battles against its own weaknesses, drifts into the army of criminals or failures, and we pity the mother where we ought to blame her. After all, the question of why women fail as mothers may be answered in one word mother-weakness. They simply lack the grit and determination to make their children behave themselves. them-selves. This is woman's greatest crime against society, for if the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, the hand that spanks the baby could reform re-form it if it would. Twentieth Century. |